Chapter IV (1)

|It is now the proper time to throw in the solitary horseman. The horizontal bars of golden light from the setting sun gleam and glitter from the dome of the court-house and bathe the green plains of Syracuse with mellow splendor. The billowy piles of fleecy bronze in the eastern sky look soft and yielding, like a Sarah Bernhardt. The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, and all nature seems oppressed with the solemn hush and stillness of the surrounding and engulfing horror.

The solitary horseman is seen coming along the Albany and Syracuse toll road. He jabs the Mexican spurs into the foamy flank of his noble cay use plug, and the lash of the quirt as it moves through the air is singing a merry song. Damon has been, delayed by road agents and wash-outs, and he is a little behind time. Besides, he fooled a little too long and dallied in Albany with his fair gazelle. But he is making up time now and he sails into the jail yard just in time to take his part. He and Pythias fall into each other's arms, borrow a chew of fine-cut from each other and weep to slow music. Dionysius comes before the curtain, bows and says the exercises will be postponed. He orders the band to play something soothing, gives Damon the appointment of superintendent of public instruction, and Pythias the Syracuse post-office, and everything is lovely. Orchestra plays something touchful. Curtain comes down. Keno. _In hoc usufruct nux vomica est_.

A TRYING SITUATION.

|There are a great many things in life which go to atone for the disappointments and sorrows which one meets, but when a young man's rival takes the fair Matilda to see the base-ball game, and sits under an umbrella beside her, and is at the height of enjoyment, and gets the benefit of a "hot ball" in the pit of his stomach, there is a nameless joy settles down in the heart of the lonesome young man, such as the world can neither give nor take away.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XIX--A STORY OF SPOTTED TAIL.

_Trifling Incidents Make Men Great.--Chief Big Mouth.--A Quarrel between Big Mouth and Spotted Tail.--The Tragic End._

|The popularity of the above-named chieftain dates from a very trifling little incident, as did that of many other men who are now great.

Spotted Tail had never won much distinction up to that time, except as the owner of an appetite, in the presence of which his tribe stood in dumb and terrible awe.

During the early days of what is now the great throbbing and ambitious West, the tribe camped near Fort Sedgwick, and Big Mouth, a chief of some importance, used to go over to the post regularly for the purpose of filling his brindle hide full of Fort Sedgwick Bloom of Youth.

As a consequence of Big Mouth's fatal yearning for liquid damnation, he generally got impudent, and openly announced on the parade ground that he could lick the entire regular army. This used to offend some of the blood-scarred heroes who had just arrived from West Point, and in the heat of the debate they would warm the venerable warrior about two feet below the back of his neck with the flat of their sabers.

This was a gross insult to Big Mouth, and he went back to the camp, where he found Spotted Tail eating a mule that had died of inflammatory rheumatism. Big Mouth tearfully told the wild epicure of the way he had been treated, and asked for a council of war. Spot picked his teeth with a tent pin, and then told the defeated relic of a mighty race that if he would quit strong drink, he would be subjected to fewer insults.

Big Mouth then got irritated, and told S. Tail that his remarks showed that he was standing in with the aggressor, and was no friend to his people.

Spotted Tail said that Mr. B. Mouth was a liar, by yon high heaven, and before there was time to think it over, he took a butcher knife, about four feet long, from its scabbard and cut Mr. Big Mouth plumb in two just between the umbilicus and the watch pocket.

As the reader who is familiar with anatomy has already surmised, Big Mouth died from the effects of this wound, and Spotted Tail was at once looked upon as the Moses of his tribe. He readily rose to prominence, and by his strict attention to the duties of his office, made for himself a name as a warrior and a pie biter, at which the world turned pale.

This should teach us the importance of taking the tide at its flood, which leads on to fortune, and to lay low when there is a hen on, as Benjamin Franklin has so truly said.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XX--THE ROMANCE OF HORSE-SHOEING.

_Recreation with a Bronco--Careful Preparations--The Bronco humps Himself Like a Camel--The Bronco in a Sling--The Bronco Full of Spirit._

|Recently I have taken a little recreation when I felt despondent, by witnessing the difficult and dangerous feat of shoeing a bronco.

Whenever I get low-spirited and feel that a critical public don't appreciate my wonderful genius as a spring poet, I go around to Brown & Boole's blacksmith shop on A street, and watch them shoe a vicious bronco. I always go back to the office cheered and soothed, and better prepared to light the battle of life.

They have a new rig now for this purpose. It consists of two broad sinches, which together cover the thorax and abdomen of the bronco, to the ends of which--the sinches, I mean--are attached ropes, four in number, which each pass over a pulley above the animal, and then are wrapped about a windlass. The bronco is led to the proper position, like a young man who is going to have a photograph taken, the sinches slipped under his body and attached to the ropes.

Then the man at the wheel makes two or three turns in rapid succession.

The bronco is seen to hump himself, like the boss camel of the grand aggregation of living wonders. He grunts a good deal and switches his tail, while the ropes continue to work in the pulleys, and the man at the capstan spits on his hands and rolls up on the wheel. After a while the bronco hangs from the ceiling like a discouraged dish rag, and after trying for two or three hundred times unsuccessfully to kick a hole in the starry firmament, he yields, and hangs at half mast while the blacksmith shoes him.

Yesterday I felt as though I must see something cheerful, and so I went over to watch a bronco getting his shoes on for the round-up. I was fortunate. They led up a quiet, gentlemanly appearing plug with all the weary, despondent air of a disappointed bronco who has had aspirations for being a circus horse, and has "got left." When they put the sinches around him he sighed as though his heart would break, and his great, soulful eyes were wet with tears. One man said it was a shame to put a gentle pony into a sling like that in order to shoe him, and the general feeling seemed to be that a great wrong was being perpetrated.

Gradually the ropes tightened on him and his abdomen began to disappear. He rose till he looked like a dead dog that had been fished out of the river with a grappling iron. Then he gave a grunt that shook the walls of the firmament, and he reached out about five yards till his hind feet felt of a greaser's eye, and with an athletic movement he jumped through the sling and lit on the blacksmith's forge with his head about three feet up the chimney. He proceeded then to do some extra ground and lofty tumbling and kicking. A large anvil was held up for him to kick till he tired himself out, and then the blacksmith put a fire and burglar-proof safe over his head and shod him.

The bronco is full of spirit, and, although docile under ordinary circumstances, he will at times get enthusiastic, and do things which he afterward, in his sober moments, bitterly regrets.

Some broncos have formed the habit of bucking. They do not all buck. Only those that are alive do so. When they are dead they are-more subdued and gentle.

A bronco often becomes so attached to his master that he will lay down his life if necessary. His master's life, I mean.

When a bronco comes up to me and lays his head over my shoulder, and asks me to scratch his chilblain for him, I always excuse myself on the ground that I have a family dependent on mo, and furthermore, that I am a United States Commissioner, and to a certain extent the government hinges on me.

Think what a ghastly hole there would be in the official staff of the republic if I were launched into eternity now, when good men are so scarce.

Some days I worry a good deal over this question. Suppose that some In principled political enemy who wanted to be United States Commissioner or Notary Public in my place should assassinate me!!!

Lots of people never see this. They see how smoothly the machinery of government moves along, and they do not dream of possible harm. They do not know how quick she might slip a cog, or the eccentric get jammed through the indicator, if, some evening when I am at the opera house, or the minstrel show, the assassin should steal up on me, and shoot a large, irregular aperture into my cerebellum.

This may not happen, of course; but I suggest it, so that the public will, as it were, throw its protecting arms about me, and not neglect me while I am alive.

A CHILD'S FAITH.

|During a big thunder shower a while ago little Willie, who slept up stairs alone, got scared and called his mother, who came up and asked him what he was frightened about. Willie frankly admitted that the thunder was a little too much for a little boy who slept alone.

"Well, if you are afraid," said his mother, pushing back the curls from his forehead, "you should pray for courage."

"All right, ma," said Willie, an idea coming into his head; "suppose you stay up here and pray while I go down stairs and sleep with paw."

HOW TO PRESERVE TEETH.

|I find," said an old man to a _Boomerang_ reporter, yesterday, "that there is absolutely no limit to the durability of the teeth, if they are properly taken care of. I never drink hot drinks, always brush my teeth morning and evening, avoid all acids whatever, and although I am sixty-five years old, my teeth are as good as ever they were."

"And that is all you do to preserve your teeth, is it?"

"Yes, sir; that's all--barring, perhaps, the fact that I put them in a glass of soft water nights."

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XXI--EXPERIENCE ON THE FEVERISH HORNET.

_Every Profession Has Its Style--Not much Difference in Folks--Timber line and Katooter--Katooter Was a Very Smart Man._

|Yes, that's so," said Woodtick Williams thoughtfully, as he looked out across the divide and beyond the foothills, toward the top of the range where the eternal snow was glittering in the summer sun.

"You are eminently correct. The gentleman from Buckskin has stated the exact opinion of the subscriber, sure as death and semi-annual assessments.

"Every profession has its style of lead and its peculiar dip toward the horizon. From the towering congressman, down to the neglected advance agent of the everlasting gospel, every profession, I allow, has its peculiar lingo. Every pork-and-beans pilgrim from the States that's been in my camp for twenty-seven years has said that the miner slings more unnecessary professional racket than anybody else; but that ain't so. Take folks as they assay, from blossom rock to lower level, there ain't much difference.

"Nine years ago, I and Timberline Monroe and Katooter Lemons, from Zion, struck the Feverish Hornet up on Slippery Ellum. First we knew the prospecting season had closed up on us and, as the lay-out for surface had pinched out, we decided to sink on the Hornet, just for luck.

"So Timberline, Katooter and me went over to Huckleberry Oleson's store at at the lower camp and soaked our physiognomy for chuck, and valley-tan, and a blastin' outfit for the job.

"Down five foot she showed 150 colors to a hunk of rock no bigger'n a plug of tobacker, with wall rocks well defined both sides and foot wall slick as a confidence game in 'Frisco.

"The quartz, with a light coat of gouge, looked as if she'd been jammed through the formation like a Sabbath-school scholar's elbow through a custard pie, and it had crushed the prehistoric stuffin' and pre-adamite sawdust out of the geological crust in good shape.

"'Katooter,' says I, 'if she shows up this way all the way down, I be teetotally dodbuttered if I don't think we've cornered the sugar at last. We'll run her down to ten foot and see how she looks to the naked eye.'

"Ten foot down she'd widen to three foot between walls, with solid gray quartz as pretty as a bank book. Then we made a mill run of five pounds in a half-gallon mortar and cleared up a dollar's worth of dust on the blade of a long-handled shovel.

"The prospectus of the Feverish Hornet was very cheering indeed.

"I sat down on a candle-box and sang something. I always twitter a few notes when I feel tickled about anything.

"Katooter listened to my singing a little while, and then he went down the gulch murmuring, something about my music and intimating that prosperity always had its little drawbacks after all.

"He slid down to the Frescoed Hell and jammed his old freckled hide so full of horse liniment of the vintage of '49 that he got entirely off the lead, and drifted so far into poverty rock that he didn't know Timberline nor me from a stomach pump.

"That's generally the way with men that turn up their noses at vocal music.

"Well, he got no better so rapidly that next day he was occupying a front seat at the biggest delirium triangle matinee you ever heard of, and was the sole proprietor of the biggest aggregation of seal-brown tarantulas and variegated caterpillars and imported centipedes that ever exhibited in Columbia's fair domain.

"Every little while he'd nail some diabolical insect crawling up his sleeve or gently walking through his hair, and then he'd yell like a maniac and pray and swear like a hired man.

"The atmosphere seemed to be level-full of bumblebees as big as a cook-stove, and every time they'd cuddle up to him of sink on him with their sultry little gimlets, Katooter would jump up and whoop like a Piute medicine man trying to assuage a wide waste of turbulent cucumber.

"At these times Katooter would lay aside his wardrobe, and, throwing me into the fire-place and Timberline under the bed, he would wander forth into the starlight, with the thermometer down to 37 degrees, and wrapped in nothing but his surging thoughts.

"By the time Timberline and me would get up and swab the cobwebs and cinders out of our eyes, Katooter would be half way up the gulch and lighting out like a freckled Greek slave hunting for a clothing store.

"First along we used to run after him and try to tire him out and corral him, but he was most too skipful, and apparently so all-fired anxious to put all the intervening distance he could between himself and the fuzzy tarantulas and fall style of centipede, that he made some pretty tall time, considering the poor trail and the light mountain air.

"Then another thing; when we got to him he was so pesky mean to hang on to.

"You've probably tried before now, when you was small, to catch the boy who tied your shirt to the top limb of a dead tree, and you have thrown all your energy into the effort, but you decided after awhile to wait till he got his clothes on before you punished him.

"That's the way it was with Katooter. He was the smartest man I ever tried to gather into the fold. We'd think we had him, and all at once he'd glide between our legs like a yaller dog and laugh a wild kind of laugh that would run the thermometer down 13 degrees, and away he'd glimmer up the trail like a red-headed right of way.

"So I got mad at last, and used to chase him with a lariat and Yellow Fever.

"Yellow Fever was a sorrel mule that belonged to the firm. We called him Yellow Fever because he was so fatal.

"Well, when Yellow Fever and me got after Katooter with the lariat, we most always gathered him in.--[Bless my soul, how I'm stringing this yarn out.]

"Well, to make a long story short, Katooter rallied after a while, and during the spell his chilblains was convalescing, and some more new skin growing on his system where he had barked it off running through the sage-brush, and falling into old deserted prospect holes. I had an offer of $50,000 for my third in the Feverish Hornet, and sold.

"Then I went down to Truckee and bought a little house of an old railroad man down there, and grubstaked myself for the winter, and allowed I'd lay off till the snow left the range in the spring.

"One night, about half after 12, I judge, I heard somebody step along to the window of my boudoir. Hearing it at that time of night, I reckoned that something crooked was going on, so I slid out of bed and got my Great Blood Searcher and Liver Purifier, with the new style of center fire and cartridge ejector, and slid up to the window, calculating to shove a tonic into whoever it might be that was picnicking around my claim.

"I looked out so as to get a good idea of where I wanted to sink on him, and then I thought before I mangled him I'd ask him if he had any choice about which part of his vitals he wanted to preserve, so I sang out to him:

"Look out below there, pard, for I'm going to call the meeting to order in a minute! Just throw up your hands, if you please, and make the grand hailing sign of distress, or I'll have to mutilate you! Just show me about where you'd have the fatal wound, and be spry about it, too, because I've got my brief costume on, and the evening air is chill!"

"He didn't understand me, apparently, for a gurgling laugh welled up from below, and the party sings back:

"Hullo, Fatty, is that you? Just lookin' to see if you'd fired up yet. You know I was to come round and flag you if second seven was out Well, I've been down to the old man's to see what's on the board. Three is two hours late and four is on time. There's two sevens out and two sections of nine. Skinney'll take out first seven and Shorty'll pull her with 102. It's you and me for second seven, with Limber Jim on front end and French to hold down the caboose. First fire is wrong side up in a washout this side of Ogallalla, and old Whatshisname that runs 258 got his crown sheet caved in and telescoped his headlight into the middle of the New Jerusalem. You know the little Swede that used to run extra for Old Hotbox on the emigrant awhile? Well, he was firing on 258 and he's under three flats and a coal-oil tank, with a brake beam across his coupler, and his system more or less relaxed. He's gone to the sweet subsequently, too. Rest of the boys are more or less demoralized, and side-tracked for repairs. Now you don't want to monkey around much, for if you don't loom up like six bits and go out on the tick, the old man'll give you a time cheek and the oriental grand bounce. You hear the mellow trill of my bazoo?"

"Then I slowly uncorked the Great Blood Purifier, and moving to the footlights where the silvery moonbeams could touch up my dazzling outlines, I said: 'Partner, I am pleased and gratified to have met you. I don't know the first ding busted thing you have said to me, but that is my misfortune. I am a plain miner, and my home is in the digestive apparatus of the earth, but for professional melody of the chin, you certainly take the cake. You also take the cake basket and what cold pie there is in on the dump. My name is Wood-tick Williams. I discovered the Feverish Hornet up on Slippery Elm. I am proud, you know. Keep right on getting more and more familiar with your profession, and by and by, when nobody can understand you, you will be promoted and respected, and you will at last be a sleeping-car conductor, and revel in the biggest mental calm, and wide shoreless sea of intellectual stagnation that the world ever saw. You will----

"But he was gone.

"Then I took a pillow sham and wiped some pulverized crackers off the soles of my feet, and went to bed, enveloped in a large gob of gloom."

THE PICNIC PLANT.

|The picnic plant will soon lift its little head to the sunshine, and the picnic manager will go out and survey the country, to find where the most God-forsaken places are, and then he will get up an excursion to some of these picturesque mud-holes and sand-piles; and the man who swore last year that he would never go to another picnic, will pack up some mustard, and bay rum, and pickles, and glycerine, and a lap-robe, and some camphor, and a spy-glass, and some court-plaster; and he will heave a sigh and go out to the glens and rural retreats, and fill his skin full of Tolu, Rock and Rye, and hatred toward all mankind and womankind; and he will skin his hands, and try to rub the downy fluff and bloom from a cactus by sitting down on it.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XXII--ANCIENT BRIC-A-BRAC

_A Mound in Medicine Bow Range--I Started to Dig Into the Vast Sarcophagus--A Glad Shout from, the Scene of Operations--A Large Queen Anne Tear Jug._

|During my rambles through the Medicine Bow range of the Rocky mountains recently, I was shown by an old frontiersman a mound which, although worn down somewhat and torn to pieces by the buffalo, the antelope and the coyote, still bore the appearance of having been at one time very large and high.

This, I was told, had, no doubt, been the burial place of some ancient tribe or race of men, the cemetery, perhaps, of a nation now unknown.

Here in the heart of a new world, where men who had known the region for fifteen or twenty years, are now called "old timers," where "new discoveries" had been made within my own recollection, we found the sepulcher of a nation that was old when the Pilgrims landed on the shores of Columbia.

I am something of an antiquarian, with all my numerous charms, and I resolved to excavate at this spot and learn the hidden secrets of those people who lived when our earth was young.

I started to dig into the vast sarcophagus. The ground was very hard. The more I worked the more I felt that I was desecrating the burial place of a mighty race of men, now powerless to defend themselves against the vandal hands that sought to mar their eternal slumber.

I resolved to continue my researches according to the vicarious plan. I secured the services of a hardened, soulless hireling, who did not wot of the solemn surroundings and who could dig faster than I could. He proceeded with the excavation business, while I sought a shady dell where I could weep alone.

It was a solemn thought, indeed. I murmured softly to myself--=

````The knights are dust,

````Their swords are rust;

````Their souls are with

````The saints, we trust.=

Just then a wood-tick ran up one of my alabaster limbs about nine feet, made a location and began to do some work on it under the United States mining laws.

I removed him by force and submitted him to the dry crushing process between a piece of micaceous slate and a fragment of deoderized, copper-stained manganese.

But we were speaking of the Aztecs, not the wood-ticks.

Nothing on earth is old save by comparison. The air we breathe, and which we are pleased to call fresh air, is only so comparatively. It is the same old air. As a recent air it is not so fresh as "Silver Threads Among the Gold."

It has been in one form and another through the ever-shifting ages all along the steady march of tireless time, but it is the same old union of various gaseous elements floating through space, only remodeled for the spring trade.

All we see or hear or feel, is old. Truth itself is old. Old and falling into disuse, too. Outside of what I am using in my business, perhaps not over two or three bales are now on the market.

Here in the primeval solitude, undisturbed by the foot of man, I had found the crumbling remnants of those who once walked the earth in their might and vaunted their strength among the powers of their world.

No doubt they had experienced the first wild thrill of all-powerful love, and thought that it was a new thing. They had known, with mingled pain and pleasure, when they struggled feebly against the omnipotent sway of consuming passion, that they were mashed, and they flattered themselves that they were the first in all the illimitable range of relentless years who had been fortunate enough to get hold of the genuine thing. All others had been base imitations.

Here, perhaps, on this very spot, the Aztec youth with a bright-eyed maiden on his arm had pledged lifelong fidelity to her shrine, and in the midnight silence had stolen away from her with a pang of vigorous regret, followed by the sobs of his soul's idol and the demoralizing, leaden rain of buckshot, with the compliments and best wishes of the old man.

While I was meditating upon these things, a glad shout from the scene of operations attracted my attention. I rose and went to the scene of excavation and found, to my unspeakable astonishment and pleasure, that the man had unearthed a large Queen Anne tear jug, with Etruscan work upon the exterior. It was simply one of the old-fashioned single-barreled tear jugs, made for a one eyed man to cry into. The vessel was about eighteen inches in height by five or six inches in diameter.

The graceful, yet perhaps severe pottery of the Aztecs, convinces me that they were fully abreast of the present century in their knowledge of the arts and sciences.

Space will not admit of an extended description of this ancient tear cooler, but I am still continuing the antiquarian researches,--vicariously, of course--and will give this subject more attention during the summer.

JOINT POWDER.

|It don't do to fool with joint powder. It's powerful stuff. I had a $10,000 mine over in the Queen of Shelby district in '51 called the Goshallhemlock claim. I was offered $10,000 for it, with $5,000 in sagebrush placer stock besides, if she opened up as well ten foot further down.

We put in a blast of joint powder, and when we went to make an examination, we couldn't find the Goshallhemlock with an assessor and a search warrant. The hole was there, but there wasn't quartz enough to throw at a yaller dog.

My idea is to sell a mine just before you put in the joint powder, and then if the buyer wants to blow the property into the middle of next Christmas let him do it.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XIII--THE TWO-HEADED GIRL.

_The Power of a Two-headed Girl to Cheer the Sad--She Is not Beautiful, but her Color Is Distinct--As a Show She Draws Better than a Scientific Lecture._

|The cultivated two-headed girl has visited the West. It is very rare that a town the size of Laramie experiences the rare treat of witnessing anything so enjoyable. In addition to the mental feast which such a thing affords, one goes away feeling better--feeling that life has more in it to live for, and is not after all such a vale of tears as he had at times believed it.

Through the trials and disappointments of this earthly pilgrimage, the soul is at times cast down and discouraged. Man struggles against ill-fortune and unlooked-for woes, year after year, until he becomes misanthropical and soured, but when a two-headed girl comes along and he sees her it cheers him up. She speaks to his better nature in two different languages at one and the same time, and at one price.

When I went to the show I felt gloomy and apprehensive. The eighteenth ballot had been taken and the bulletins seemed to have a tiresome sameness. The future of the republic was not encouraging. I felt as though, if I could get first cost for the blasted thing, I would sell it.

I had also been breaking in a pair of new boots that day, and spectators had been betting wildly on the boots, while I had no backers at three o'clock in the afternoon, and had nearly decided to withdraw on the last ballot. I went to the entertainment feeling as though I should criticise it severely.

The two-headed girl is not beautiful. Neither one of her, in fact, is handsome. There is quite a similarity between the two, probably because they have been in each other's society a great deal and have adopted the same ways.

She is an Ethiopian by descent and natural choice being about the same complexion as Frank Miller's oil blacking, price ten cents.

She was at one time a poor slave, but by her winning ways and genuine integrity and genius, she has won her way to the hearts of the American people. She has thoroughly demonstrated the fact that two heads are better than one.

A good sized audience welcomed this popular favorites. When she came forward to the foot-lights and made her two-ply bow she was greeted by round after round of applause from the _elite_ of the city.

I felt pleased and gratified. The fact that a recent course of scientific lectures here was attended by from fifteen to thirty people, and the present brilliant success of the two-headed girl proved to me, beyond a doubt, that we live in an age of thought and philosophical progress.

Science may be all right in its place, but does it make the world better? Does it make a permanent improvement on the minds and thoughts of the listener? Do we go away from such a lecture feeling that we have made a grand stride toward a glad emancipation from the mental thraldom of ignorance and superstition? Do people want to be assailed, year after year, with a nebular theory, and the Professor Huxley theory of natural selections and things of that nature?

No! 1,000 time no!

They need to be led on quietly by an appeal to their better natures. They need to witness a first-class bureau of monstrosities, such as men with heads as big as a band wagon, women with two heads, Cardiff giants, men with limbs bristling out all over them like the velvety bloom on a prickly pear.

When I get a little leisure, and can attend to it, I am going to organize a grand constellation of living wonders of this kind, and make thirteen or fourteen hundred farewell tours with it, not so much to make money, but to meet a long-felt want of the American people, for something which will give a higher mental tone to the tastes of those who never lag in their tireless march toward perfection.

OUR COMPLIMENTS.

|We have nothing more to say of the editor of the Sweetwater _Gazette_. Aside from the fact that he is a squint-eyed, consumptive liar, with a breath like a buzzard and a record like a convict, we don't know anything against him. He means well enough, and if he can evade the penitentiary and the vigilance committee for a few more years, there is a chance for him to end his life in a natural way. If he don't tell the truth a little more plentifully, however, the Green River people will rise as one man and churn him up till there won't be anything left of him but a pair of suspenders and a wart.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XIV--A PATHETIC EPISODE IN NORTHERN WISCONSIN.

_A Trip to Northern Wisconsin--How Foreign Lumber Is manufactured--Iron Dogs--A Sad Accident--? The Funeral Procession--A Solemn Moral._

|I have just returned from a trip up the North Wisconsin railway, where I went to catch a string of codfish, and anything else that might be contagious. The trip was a pleasant one, and productive of great good in many ways. I am hardening myself to railway traveling, like Timberline Jones' man, so that I can stand the return journey to Laramie in July.

Northern Wisconsin is the place where the "foreign lumber" comes from which we use in Laramie in the erection of our palatial residences. I visited the mill last week that furnished the lumber used in the Oasis hotel at Greeley. They yank a big wet log into that mill and turn it into cash as quick as a railroad man can draw his salary out of the pay car. The log is held on a carriage by means of iron dogs while it is being worked into lumber. These iron dogs are not like those we see on the front steps of a brown-stone house occasionally. They are another breed of dogs.

The managing editor of the mill lays out the log in his mind, and works it into dimension stuff, shingle bolts, slabs, edgings, two by fours, two by eights, two by sixes, etc., so as to use the goods to the best advantage, just as a woman takes a dress pattern and cuts it so she won't have to piece the front breadths, and will still have enough left to make a polonaise for the last-summer gown.

I stood there for a long time watching the various saws and listening to their monotonous growl, and wishing that I had been born a successful timber thief instead of a poor boy without a rag to my back.

At one of these mills, not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage, and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket, and then began on him.

But there's no use going into details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the sawdust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him, no one ever knew.

The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.

We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz saw when it moveth itself aright.

THE SECRET OF HEALTH.

|Health journals are now asserting, that to maintain a sound constitution you should lie only on the right side. The health journals may mean well enough; but what are you going to do if you are editing a Democratic paper?

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XXV--BILL NYE ESSAYS A NOVELETTE.

_Harry Bevans--Fanny Buttonhook--True Love Takes its Usual Course--A Letter to Fanny--A Sweet, Short, Summer--A Happy Marriage--Little Birdie._

|I never wrote a novel, because I always thought it required more of a mashed raspberry imagination than I could muster, but I was the business manager, once, for a year and a half, of a little two-bit novelette that has never been published.

I now propose to publish it, because I cannot keep it to myself any longer.

Allow me, therefore, to reminisce.

Harry Bevans was an old schoolmate of mine in the days of ([x-y]/2)3, and although Bevans was not his sure-enough name, it will answer for the purposes herein set forth. At the time of which I now speak he was more bashful than a book agent, and was trying to promote a cream-colored mustache and buff "Done-gals" on the side.

Suffice it to say that he was madly in love with Fanny Buttonhook, and too bashful to say so by telephone.

Her name wasn't Buttonhook, but I will admit it for the sake of argument. Harry lived over at Kalamazoo, we will say, and Fanny at Oshkosh. These were not the exact names of the towns, but I desire to bewilder the public, in order to avoid any harrassing disclosures in the future. It is always well enough, I find, to deal gently with those who are alive and moderately muscular.

Young Bevans was not specially afraid of old man Buttonhook, or his wife. He didn't dread the enraged parent worth a cent. He wasn't afraid of anybody under the cerulean dome, in fact, except Miss Buttonhook, but when she sailed down the main street, Harry lowered his colors and dodged into the first place he found open, whether it was a millinery store or a livery stable.

Once, in an unguarded moment, he passed so near her that the gentle south wind caught up the cherry ribbon that Miss Buttonhook wore at her throat, and slapped Mr. Bevans across the cheek with it before he knew what ailed him. There was a little vision of straw hat, brown hair, and pink-and-white cuticle, as it were, a delicate odor of violets, the "swish" of a summer silk, and my friend, Mr. Bevans, put his hand to his head, like a man who has a sun-stroke, and fell into a drug store and a state of wild mash, ruin and hopeless chaos.

His bashfulness was not seated nor chronic. It was the varioloid, and didn't hurt him only when Miss Buttonhook was present, or in sight. He was polite and chatty with other girls, and even dared to be blithe and gay sometimes, too, but when Frances loomed up in the distance, he would climb a rail fence nine feet high to evade her.

He told me once that he wished I would erect the frame-work of a letter to Fanny, in which he desired to ask that he might open up a correspondence with her.

He would copy and mail it, he said, and he was sure that I. being a disinterested party, would be perfectly calm.

I wrote a letter for him of which I was moderately proud. It would melt the point on a lightning rod, it seemed to me, for it was just as full of gentleness and poetic soothe as it could be, and Tupper. Webster's Dictionary and my scrap book had to give down first rate. Still it was manly and square-toed. It was another man's confession, and I made it bulge out with frankness and candor.

As luck would have it, I went over to Oshkosh about the time Harry's prize epistle reached that metropolis, and having been a confidant of Miss B.'s from early childhood. I had the pleasure of reading Bev's letter, and advising the young lady about the correspondence.

Finally a bright thought struck her. She went over to an easy chair, and sat down on her foot, coolly proposing that I should outline a letter replying to Harry's, in a reserved and rather frigid manner, yet bidding him dare to hope that if his orthography and punctuation continued correct, he might write occasionally, though it must be considered entirely _sub rosa_ and abnormally _entre-nous_ on account of "Pa."

By the way. "Pa" was a druggist, and one of the salts of the earth--Epsom salts of course.

I agreed to write the letter, swore never to reveal the secret workings of the order, the grips, explanations, passwords and signals, and then wrote her a nice, demure, startled-fawn letter, as brief as the collar to a party dress, and as solemn as the Declaration of Independence.

Then I said good-by, and returned to my own home, which was neither in Kalamazoo nor Oshkosh. There I received a flat letter from William Henry Bevans, inclosing one from Fanny, and asking for suggestions as to a reply. Her letter was in Miss Buttonhook's best vein. I remember having written it myself.

Well, to cut a long story short, every other week I wrote a letter for Fanny, and on intervening weeks I wrote one for the lover at Kalamazoo. By keeping copies of all letters written, I had a record showing where I was, and avoided saying the same pleasant things twice.

Thus the short, sweet summer scooted past. The weeks were filled with gladness, and their memory even now comes back to me, like a wood-violet-scented vision. A wood-violet-scented vision comes high, but it is necessary in this place.

Toward winter the correspondence grew a little tedious, owing to the fact that I had a large and tropical boil on the back of my neck, which refused to declare its intentions or come to a focus, for three weeks. In looking over the letters of both lovers yesterday, I could tell by the tone of each just where this boil began to grow up, as it were, between two fond hearts.

This feeling grew till the middle of December, when there was a red-hot quarrel. It was exciting and spirited, and after I had alternately flattered myself first from Kalamazoo and then from Oshkosh, it was a genuine luxury to have a row with myself through the medium of the United States mails.

Then I made up and got reconciled. I thought it would be best to secure harmony before the holidays, so that Harry could go over to Oshkosh and spend Christmas. I therefore wrote a letter for Harry in which he said he had, no doubt, been hasty, and he was sorry. It should not occur again. The days had been like weary ages since their quarrel, he said--vicariously, of course--and the light had been shut out of his erstwhile joyous life. Death would be a luxury unless she forgave him, and Hades would be one long, sweet picnic and lawn festival unless she blessed him with her smile.

You can judge how an old newspaper reporter, with a scarlet imagination, would naturally dash the color into another man's picture of humility and woe.

She replied--by proxy--that he was not to blame. It was her waspish temper and cruel thoughtlessness. She wished he would come over and take dinner with them on Christmas day and she would tell him how sorry she was. When the man admits that he's a brute and the woman says she's sorry, it behooves the eagle eye of the casual spectator to look up into the blue sky for a quarter of an hour, till the reconciliation has had a chance and the brute has been given time to wipe a damp sob from his coat-collar.

I was invited to the Christmas dinner. As a successful reversible amanuensis I thought I deserved it. I was proud and happy. I had passed through a lover's quarrel and sailed in with white-winged peace on time, and now I reckoned that the second joint, with an irregular fragment of cranberry jelly, and some of the dressing, and a little of the white meat please, was nothing more than right.

Mr. Bevans forgot to be bashful twice during the day, and even smiled once also. He began to get acquainted with Fanny after dinner, and praised her beautiful letters. She blushed clear up under her "wave," and returned the compliment.

That was natural. When he praised her letters I did not wonder, and when she praised his I admitted that she was eminently correct. I never witnessed better taste on the part of two young and trusting hearts.

After Christmas I thought they would both feel like buying a manual and doing their own writing, but they did not dare to do so evidently. They seemed to be afraid the change would be detected, so I piloted them into the middle of the succeeding fall, and then introduced the crisis into both their lives.

It was a success.

I felt about as well as though I were to be cut down myself and married off in the very prime of life. Fanny wore the usual clothing adopted by young ladies who are about to be sacrificed to a great horrid man. I cannot give the exact description of her trousseau, but she looked like a hazel-eyed angel, with a freckle on the bridge of her nose. The groom looked a little scared, and moved his gloved hands as though they weighed twenty-one pounds apiece.

However, it's all over now. I was up there recently to see them. They are quite happy. Not too happy, but just happy enough. They call their oldest son Birdie. I wanted them to call him William, but they were headstrong and named him Birdie. That wounded my pride, and so I called him Earlie Birdie.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XXVI--THE DAUGHTER OF BOB TAIL FLUSH.

_The Dusky Bride of Old Fly Up-the-Creek is a Lover of the Beautiful--The Indian Maiden in-Her Wild Simplicity--How She Appears to the Man of Sentiment--No Ruthless Hand Shall Tear the Cloak from the True Indian Maiden._

|One of the attractions of life at the Cheyenne Indian agency, is the reserved seat ticket to the regular slaughter-house matinee. The agency butchers kill at the rate of ten bullocks per hour while at work, and so great was the rush to the slaughter-pens for the internal economy of the slaughtered animals, that Major Love found it necessary to erect a box office and gate, where none but those holding tickets could enter and provide themselves with these delicacies.

This is not a sensation, it is the plain truth, and we desire to call the attention of those who love and admire the Indian at a distance of 2,000 miles, and to the æsthetic love for the beautiful which prompts the crooked-fanged and dusky bride of old Fly-up-the-Creek to rob the soap-grease man and the glue factory, that she may make a Cheyenne holiday. As a matter of fact, common decency will not permit us to enter into a discussion of this matter. Firstly, it would not be fit for the high order of readers who peruse these pages, and secondly, the Indian maiden at the present moment stands on a lofty crag of the Rocky mountains, beautiful in her wild simplicity, wearing the fringed garments of her tribe. To the sentimentalist she appears outlined against the glorious sky of the new West, wearing a coronet of eagle's feathers, and a health-corset trimmed with fantastic bead-work and wonderful and impossible designs in savage art.

Shall we then rush in and with ruthless hand shatter this beautiful picture? Shall we portray her as she appears on her return from the great slaughter-house benefit and moral aggregation of digestive mementos? Shall we draw a picture of her clothed in a horse-blanket, with a necklace of the false teeth of the paleface, and her coarse, unkempt hair hanging over her smoky features and clinging to her warty, bony neck? No, no. Far be it from us to destroy the lovely vision of copper-colored grace and smoke-tanned beauty, which the freckled student of the effete East has erected in the rose-hued chambers of fancy. Let her dwell there as the plump-limbed princess of a brave people. Let her adorn the hat-rack of his imagination--proud, beautiful, grand, gloomy and peculiar--while as a matter of fact, she is at that moment leaving the vestibule of the slaughter-house, conveying in the soiled laprobe--which is her sole adornment--the mangled lungs of a Texas steer.

No man shall ever say that we have busted the beau-ful Cigar Sign Vision that he has erected in his memory. Let the graceful Indian queen that has lived on in his heart ever since he studied history and saw the graphic picture of the landing of Columbus, in which Columbus is just unsheathing his bread knife, and the stage Indians are fleeing to the tall brush; let her, we say, still live on. The ruthless hand that writes nothing but everlasting truth, and the stub pencil that yanks the cloak of the false and artificial from cold and perhaps unpalatable fact, will spare this little imaginary Indian maiden with a back-comb and gold garters. Let her withstand the onward march of centuries, while the true Indian maiden eats the fricasseed locust of the plains, and wears the cavalry pants of progress. We may be rough and thoughtless many times, but we cannot come forward and ruthlessly shatter the red goddess at whose shrine the far-away student of Blackhawk, and other fourth-reader warriors, worship.

As we said, we decline to pull the cloak from the true Indian maiden of to-day and show her as she is. That cloak may be all she has on, and no gentleman will be rude even to the daughter of Old Bob-Tail-Flush, the Cheyenne brave.

LOAFING AROUND HOME.

|While other young men put on their seal-brown overalls and wrench the laurel wreath and other vegetables from cruel fate, the youth who dangles near the old nest, and eats the hard-earned groceries of his father, shivers on the brink of life's great current and sheds the scalding tear.

THE PLUMAGE OF THE OSTRICH.

|The ostrich is chiefly valuable for the plumage which he wears, and which, when introduced into the world of commerce, makes the husband almost wish that he were dead.

SOME EARNEST THOUGHTS.

|Young man, what are you living for? Have you an object dear to you as life, and without the attainment of which you feel that your life will have been a wide, shoreless waste of shadow, peopled by the specters of dead ambitions? Is it your consuming ambition to paddle quietly but firmly up the stream of time with manly strokes, against the current of public opinion, or to linger along the seductive banks, going in swimming, or, careless of the future, gathering shells and tadpoles along the shore?

Have you a distinct idea of a certain position in life which you wish to attain? Have you decided whether you will be a great man, and die in the poor-house, and have a nice comfortable monument after you are dead, for your destitute family to look at, or will you content yourself to plug along through life as a bank president?

These, young men, are questions of moment. They are questions of two moments. They come home to our hearts to-day with terrible earnestness.

You can take your choice in the great battle of life, whether you will bristle up and win a deathless name, and owe almost everybody, or be satisfied with scads and mediocrity.

Why do you linger and fritter away the heyday of life, when you might skirmish around and win some laurels? Many of those who now stand at the head of the nation as statesmen and logicians, were once unknown, unhonored and unsung. Now they saw the air in the halls of Congress, and their names are plastered on the temple of fame.

They were not born great. Some of them only weighed six pounds to start with. But they have rustled. They have peeled their coats and made rome howl.

You can do the same. You can win some laurels, too, if you will brace up and secure them when they are ripe.

Daniel Webster and President Garfield and Dr. Tanner and George Eliot were all, at one time, poor boys. They had to start at the foot of the ladder and toil upward.

They struggled against poverty and public opinion bravely, till they won a name in the annals of history, and secured to their loved ones palatial homes with lightning rods and mortgages on them.

So may you, if you will make the effort. All these things are within your reach. Live temperately on $9 per month. That's the way we got our start. Burn the midnight oil if necessary. Get some true, noble-minded young lady of your acquaintance to assist you. Tell her of your troubles and she will tell you what to do. She will gladly advise you.

Then you can marry her, and she will advise you some more. After that she will lay aside her work any time to advise you. You needn't be out of advice at all unless you want to. She, too, will tell you when you have made a mistake. She will come to you frankly and acknowledge that you have make a jackass of yourself.

<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b> XXVII--OUR GREAT NATIONAL MOTTO.